A High Performance Server for Data-Intensive Computation

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Computational and Systems Biology Initiative at MIT (CSBi) requests funds to purchase a symmetric multi-processing server with storage area network data storage (SMP-SAN) enabling scientists to handle data-intensive computational problems related to a wide variety of Systems Biology projects. This centrally- accessible computational resource is critically required for the immediate progress of several labs engaged in fundamental aspects of biological research. In this proposal, we describe a significant and growing subset of computational biology problems that due to large data sizes cannot be tackled using traditional 32-bit clusters connected to data on network attached storage (NAS) devices. It is our intention to augment the computational resources available in the CSBi High-Performance Computing (HPC) core and the Whitehead-MIT Biolmaging Center with a base configuration of an SMP server containing sixteen 64-bit Itanium2 processors with 64 gigabytes (GB) memory, running a generic 64-bit capable linux operating system (OS), and several terabytes (TBs) of data storage with multiple fiber-channel connections enabling multi-gigabit per second low latency bandwidth. The SMP-SAN will allow researchers to easily collect hundreds of GB to TB of data and directly address the computational needs in two major areas of biology described in this proposal: imaging and proteomics. The projects range from development of imaging technologies to study cellular behavior and non-invasive methods for cancer diagnosis to identifying, understanding and modeling proteins to help in drug discovery and clinical diagnosis. The resource will be located in the Whitehead-MIT Biolmaging Center and integrated with the CSBi HPC resources. The Biolmaging Center and the CSBi HPC Core have extensive experience with management of high-performance computing systems and large data storage systems and are committed to the support and maintenance of the proposed system.